Why Manet’s Masterpiece Has Confounded Historians for over a Century
Paris, 1863. The French government prepares to launch its biannual Salon, which hosts the day’s most important painting and sculpture in the city’s Academie des Beaux-Arts. Artists from around Europe submit their landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and historical scenes for consideration. A jury determines which artists will—and will not—be permitted to exhibit their work on the academy’s hallowed walls. They ultimately reject canvases by such luminaries as Paul Cezanne, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
In an attempt to appease the spurned artists, Emperor Napoleon III establishes a separate exhibition, called the “Salon des Refusés,” to be held at the Palais de l’Industrie. Instead of becoming derided outcasts, however, the refusés ultimately achieve long-lasting fame; history remembers the group as avant-garde pioneers. “The Salon des Refusés may very well represent the most decisive institutional development in the progress of modern art,” art historian Albert Boime once wrote.
Édouard Manet
Olympia, 1863
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
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Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), known in English as The Luncheon on the Grass, was first shown in this historic exhibition. The artwork not only stirred controversy, it also helped inaugurate a new kind of painting. The canvas, which features two clothed men and two women—one half-dressed and the other nude—picnicking in a verdant grove, has inspired too many interpretations to count. Over the past 156 years, artists and critics alike have continued to generate novel ways to find meaning in what’s now one of Western art history’s most iconic images.
“It’s up to us to make sense of it according to our own priorities and interpretations,” art historian Steven Z. Levine told me recently by phone. The painting “remains precious to us because it gives us the chance to reflect ourselves. We learn about ourselves by writing about the work of art.” Over the decades, scholars have alternately written about the work from feminist, formalist, and Marxist lenses, looking, respectively, at its depiction of women, its position within a larger history of the medium, and its situation within a socioeconomic and political framework.
Titian
Concert in the Open Air, ca. 1510
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Permanent collection
One of the reasons for the diverse responses is because Manet left us little indication of his own motives for Le Déjeuner. Art historian Richard R. Brettell once described the artist’s own elusiveness. “His letters are few and far between,” he wrote, “and, therefore, his feelings and psychological problems are difficult either to document or to imagine.” That mysteriousness hasn’t stopped other scholars from attributing a motive. Nancy Locke, for example, has attempted to root Manet’s artistic impulse in his family life. The artist, after all, is said to have modeled one of the men in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as a composite of his two brothers, Eugène and Gustave. The nude female figure in the foreground of the painting was likewise inspired by Manet’s favorite model, Victorine Meurent, who posed as the central figure for many of his other canvases, including his 1863 masterpiece Olympia.
What historians do know for sure is that Manet intended it for the Salon rather than for private hands. This decision marked a major departure in artistic practice. Up through the previous generation of artists (which included Eugène Delacroix, who died in 1863, the same year of the Salon des Refusés), artists had worked almost exclusively on commissions from the church, state, or wealthy patrons. Manet serves as evidence that artists were becoming increasingly autonomous, establishing their own unique visions by self-determining what to capture on canvas or in sculpture.
Marcantonio Raimondi , After Raphael
The Judgment of Paris; he is sitting at left with Venus, Juno and Pallas Athena, a winged victory above; in the upper section the Sun in his chariot preceeded by Castor and Pollux on horseback; at lower right two river gods and a naiad above whom Jupiter, an eagle, Ganymede, Diana and another Goddess, ca. 1510–1520
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Yet there was still a strict hierarchy for different painting genres. The academy ranked historical scenes first, followed by portraiture, landscape, and finally still lifes. “What Manet does [in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe],” art historian Therese Dolan told me, “is take on each category…borrowing iconography from Old Master paintings and changing it so dramatically that it looks like a mockery.” The monumental painting features a group of human subjects, a natural landscape, and a basket of fruit in a quintessential art-historical form—the pastoral respite.
Art historians—most notably, Michael Fried—have cited Manet’s varied source materials to interpret the painting. The Pastoral Concert (ca. 1509), first attributed to Giorgione and then to Titian, features two nude women and two clothed men sitting on a grassy knoll in a position akin to the figures in Le Déjeuner. Giorgione’s earlier painting The Tempest (1506–08)—which features a half-clothed woman breastfeeding her baby on a grassy slope, looking almost at the viewer instead of at the soldier just beyond her—is additionally seen as a precursor. The enigmatic figure poses almost exactly like the central woman in Manet’s canvas. To drive home his allusions to Italian Renaissance masters, Manet also referred to Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving based on Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris (ca. 1510–20), which also shows three characters sitting on the grass in a pose mimicked by Manet’s figures.
The 18th-century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau’s La Partie Carrée (or The Foursome) from about 1713 has also been named as a possible reference point. This painting similarly features four conversing figures (again, two men and two women) spotlit in a garden at night. In his own work, Manet took the provocations of Watteau’s painting—the subjects appear to have sneaked out of their homes for a late-night rendezvous, and the title hints at sexual undertones—and amplified them to scandalous proportions. Such explicit lust in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe shocked the painting’s first audiences—as did the fact that the clothed men are cavorting with women who are most likely sex workers.
Antoine Watteau, The Foursome, ca. 1713. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
By quoting other masterworks spanning centuries and nationalities, Manet augured a major modernist enterprise. “People realized painting was old and needed to change, and Manet was changing it,” Dolan said. “He kicked dirt in the face of the academics.” Since the exhibition of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, artists from Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso have made the re-making of past paintings (including Manet’s) an integral part of their practices.
Just two years after the Salon des Refusés, Monet created his own version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in his famously sunny Impressionist style. Picasso devoted an entire series to reimagining Diego Velazquez’s iconic Las Meninas (1665), and explicitly explored Manet’s original composition in his own massive “Luncheon on the Grass” series (1959–61), comprised of over 200 paintings, drawings, maquettes, and prints. More recently, Mickalene Thomas restaged Manet’s famous scene with a group of African-American women at the Museum of Modern Art.
BMW will unveil “The Electric AI Canvas” at Art Basel in Basel 2023, an installation inspired by the new BMW i5. A unique combination of art and technology that uses AI in a responsible manner to create an immersive on-site art experience.
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Munich/Basel. On the occasion of Art Basel in Basel 2023, BMW proudly presents “The Electric AI Canvas” an extension of the entirely virtual work “The Ultimate AI Masterpiece”. Now, for the very first time, released as an awe-inspiring physical art experience that transforms the 100% electric BMW i5 into a dynamic canvas of distinct generative art and featuring works by contemporary artists Esther Mahlangu, Kohei Nawa, Eric N. Mack, Koo Jiyoon and Bin Woo Hyuk. “The Electric AI Canvas” will be exhibited from June 12 to 18, 2023, at Art Basel in Basel, the world’s premier art show for Modern and contemporary art. Additionally, as a global partner of the Art Basel shows, BMW will once again provide the VIP car service.
In collaboration with creative technologist Nathan Shipley (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) and Gary Yeh (ArtDrunk), custom artificial intelligence-generated animations are crafted using AI models trained on a curated dataset of works from renowned contemporary artists. These AI models are built upon a foundational model trained from over 50,000 images spanning 900 years of art history. The AI generates entirely new abstract animations based on learned styles from classical and contemporary art, which are then projected onto the BMW i5.
“BMW has been at the forefront of innovative technology and design to create cutting-edge automobiles. With ‘The Electric AI Canvas,’ virtual and physical worlds collide, and the connection between human senses and artificial intelligence as a tool to create new artworks can be experienced,” says Paul de Courtois, President & CEO BMW (Switzerland) inc.
According to Gary Yeh, “This is an exciting moment to build on our previous art and AI collaboration, which we had always envisioned activating in person. Realizing this collaboration’s full potential will create a unique opportunity for art fair visitors to experience digital art, a medium that can often feel disconnected from the physical world. At the forefront of contemporary art, the artists that we’ve brought together bring a variety of global perspectives and share in their unique explorations of materials and culture. As the animations evolve in front of your eyes, we hope to take you on a journey through their worlds and how they represent the fabric of our society. Past, present, and future.”
For “The Electric AI Canvas”, Nvidia’s AI architecture StyleGAN is trained to evoke various artistic styles and then generate abstract evolving animations. After training a base model to represent art in general, StyleGAN is further trained on works from the participating contemporary artists. “We wanted to explore what happens when an AI image-generation model encounters works by specific artists; how do the results change when different parameters of the algorithm are modified and how can we use that to create animations that evoke the essential feeling of a particular artist’s work,” asks Nathan Shipley. “We see experiments like this as part of a fascinating early conversation about ways that AI can be used in art-making.”
These newly created animations are now showcased for the first time as an on-site art experience employing projection-mapping onto the BMW i5 and shifting through each artist’s distinctive style and aesthetic. The animations are amplified and reflected by mirrors, immersing viewers within the experience.
Since the digital debut in 2020, AI in art-making has stirred controversy, raising questions about ethics, creativity and authenticity. Shipley and Yeh approach the use of AI for art by focusing on how the technology can support artists and amplify their artistic visions, rather than to replace them. “It is essential that our experiments with AI for art are done in a responsible, thoughtful, and human-first way,” says Shipley.
This human-machine art installation brings forth a distinct convergence of innovation and creativity. It continues BMW’s engagement in crucial dialogues about technology and art in the AI era. Beyond visual artistry, the Electric AI Canvas stands as a testament to BMW’s dedication to human-centred technology and sustainability, exploring the potential of AI as a creative tool.
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For its 2023 edition in Basel, Art Basel will bring together 284 leading international galleries to present the highest quality artworks across all media – from painting and sculpture to photography and digital works – by artists ranging from early-twentieth-century Modern pioneers to contemporary practitioners. A strong line-up of galleries from across Europe will be joined by new and returning exhibitors from around the world.
